The Reds have had many problems over their long and convoluted history, but few so wonderful as this: They have more good infielders than they can use. And not just good, but young, and mostly on pre-arbitration deals. The oldest and most expensive, Jeimer Candelario, they’ve just signed to a three-year, $45 million contract. He’s only 30, and coming off a season in which he posted a 117 wRC+.

The other six guys include a recent rookie of the year, Jonathan India, and five talented youngsters age 26 or younger: Spencer Steer, Elly De La Cruz, Matt McLain, Christian Encarnacion-Strand, and Noelvi Marte. Steer had a cameo at the end of 2022, but the other four got their first taste of major league action last year and performed somewhere between competently and superbly. Read the rest of this entry »

The Tampa Bay Rays farm system has been consistently robust over the past half dozen seasons, and while it is no longer ranked first or second, it remains top notch. Currently populated with the likes of Junior Caminero, Carson Williams, Curtis Mead, and Xavier Isaac, it contains a number of high-ceiling players projected to contribute at the big league level, some as soon as this year. That is especially the case for some of the position players, especially Caminero, who debuted in the big leagues last September and is one of baseball’s best prospects.

Blake Butera is as well versed on Tampa Bay’s pipeline as anyone. Promoted to Senior Director Player Development at the conclusion of the 2023 campaign, he has worked in the system as a minor league coach, manager, and field coordinator since 2017. In each of his prior positions, he’s had a hands-on role with the development of the players he now oversees.

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David Laurila: I asked you about Junior Caminero when we spoke in December 2022. Outside of gaining more experience, what has changed with him since that time?

Blake Butera: “Honestly, not much. If I had to pick one thing, I would say it’s his defense. He’s made a concerted effort to get better at third base, and also shortstop, which gives him the opportunity to play shortstop if needed. Which it could be. He’s still learning the third base position. He hasn’t played a ton there; he played more shortstop when he was younger, and then we put him at third base predominantly last year. He’s really focused on his defense — first-step quickness, reading the hops at third, getting used to the different angles.

“Offensively, it’s more so just being a little bit more patient at the plate and going to get pitches that he can drive versus trying to hit everything. To be honest, he can hit everything, which is why he’s been swinging at a lot of different pitches.” Read the rest of this entry »

Scouting is a complex process. Sure, subjectivity and personal preference are biases that will always color the approach scouts take during the evaluation process. But beyond that, the task of describing in words how players differ, and what context is relevant during each player’s individual evaluation, is an entirely different type of challenge than just separating the “good” from the “bad.”

When writing scouting reports, I’m often reminded of a thought experiment that was introduced to me in an undergraduate linguistics class, wherein the professor had us each imagine a bowl of oranges on a kitchen counter. He then asked us how we would approach the task of going into another room and describing one specific orange in that bowl, such that the person we were talking to, having not previously seen the bowl of oranges, could go into the kitchen and successfully select the orange we were describing. The limits of language were clearly illustrated by this exercise. Assuming there weren’t any obviously different oranges (no tangelos or satsumas to make our delineation clear), it required us to avoid terms like “more orange” or “less squishy” because those terms lose meaning without an agreed upon reference point. Read the rest of this entry »

Jorge Soler is getting nearly as far away from Miami as he possibly can. The 6’4” power hitter has agreed to a three-year, $42 million deal with the San Francisco Giants. Susan Slusser broke the news of the deal, and Mike Rodriguez reported the terms.

Soler, who debuted with the Cubs in 2014 and also played for the Royals, Braves, and Marlins, opted out of the third and final year of the deal he signed with Miami, capitalizing on the second-best season of his 11-year career both in terms of health and overall production. Soler ranked 19th on our Top 50 Free Agents list, and his deal is just $1 million per year below the three years and $45 million that both Ben Clemens and MLB Trade Rumors predicted for him. The deal also nets Soler $1 million more than this year than the $13 million he would have made had he stayed with the Marlins.

There’s plenty of risk here. Soler was an All-Star in 2023, the World Series MVP in 2021, and the American League home run champ in 2019. He obliterates four-seam fastballs, and he’s the kind of player who can go on a tear and put a team on his back. He’s also about to turn 32, and he missed half the 2022 season due to back and pelvis injuries. The 1.9 WAR he put up in 2023 was not only the second-best mark of his career, but just the second time he even surpassed 0.7, the total he recorded as a 22-year-old rookie in 2014. Soler has appeared in 100 games only four times in his 11 years in the big leagues. It’s encouraging that three of those four seasons came over the past five years, but players (and humans in general) don’t usually see their health improve as they transition into their mid-30s.

Moreover, Soler doesn’t contribute on the bases or with the glove, and he’s best suited for a DH role. Soler spent just 42 games in the outfield in 2023. That might not sound like much to you, but the defensive metrics agreed that it was way, way too much. Over the course of Soler’s 11 seasons, the four major defensive metrics — DRS, DRP, OAA, and UZR — have been unanimous in their contempt for his glove. Combined, those four systems have evaluated Soler’s defense 42 times (11 seasons tracked by DRS, DRP, and UZR, plus nine by OAA). Of those 42 ratings, 38 were negative, three gave Soler a rating of exactly 0, and just one was positive — when DRP credited Soler with 0.8 runs prevented in 2019.

Despite Soler’s dreadful defense, San Francisco will use him at times in the outfield, likely as a way to spell Michael Conforto and Mike Yastrzemski against left-handed pitching. Under former manager Gabe Kapler, the Giants mixed and matched out of necessity, but also by design; even with a new skipper, Bob Melvin, that trend is likely to continue to some degree considering the personnel on their roster. Over the past three seasons, San Francisco has had just six players qualify for the batting title and eight total qualified player-seasons. (Yastrzemski and Thairo Estrada each have qualified twice in the last three years.) Only three teams have had fewer qualified seasons, and half of the major league clubs have had at least 12 in that span. But no matter how frequently Melvin makes him wear a glove, Soler will slot into the lineup nicely by providing real production from the right side of the plate, something the team sorely lacked last year.

For now, though, let’s set our reservations aside for a minute and admire the stylistic fit. It’s hard to think of a team that needs power more than the San Francisco Giants, and it’s hard to look at Jorge Soler and think of anything other than power. If you peruse other articles about this signing, you’ll come across multiple variations of the word slug. Depending on your outlet of choice, the Giants have variously signed up for three years of “slugger Jorge Soler,” “veteran slugger Jorge Soler,” “Free-Agent Slugger Jorge Soler,” “former Miami Marlins slugger Jorge Soler,” “slugging outfielder Jorge Soler,” and even “slugger and former World Series MVP.” All of these descriptions are apt. He’s not up there to hit Soler flares. Soler slugs.

The Giants could use some of that. Famously, no Giant has had a 30-homer season since a 39-year-old Barry Bonds hit 45 in 2004 (unless you’re counting Jeff Samardzija and Madison Bumgarner, who allowed 30 homers in 2017 and 2019, respectively). In fact, over that same time frame, Soler has the same number of seasons with 27 or more home runs as the Giants do: three. The difference is that only four times has Soler been healthy enough to accrue 400 plate appearances in a season, whereas the Giants have had 109 different player-seasons reach that threshold over the past 24 years.

In 2023, the Giants ranked 19th in home runs, 23rd in ISO and exit velocity, and 27th in slugging. Some of that has to do with Oracle Park, which, according to Statcast’s park factors, ranks as the 27th-worst park for home runs for both left-handed and right-handed batters. But that’s why you go get someone as powerful as Soler (or, for that matter, Arson Judge), who hits moonshots that would be no-doubters anywhere. According to Statcast, if he’d played all of his games in San Francisco last year, Oracle Park would have cost Soler just four of his 36 home runs. Moreover, after spending two years at loanDepot park — one of the three stadiums that make it even harder for righties to leave the yard than Oracle — there’s little chance that he’ll be intimidated and a much better chance that he’ll be the first player to launch a ball into that giant baseball mitt above the left field bleachers. Or maybe Soler, who has hit six opposite-field home runs with an estimated distance of at least 400 feet, will become the first right-handed player to send a ball into McCovey Cove.

Still, Soler alone is not going to solve San Francisco’s problems on offense. According to ZiPS, Soler’s projected SLG of .441 ranks 101st in the majors, and the second Giant doesn’t come until Wilmer Flores checks in at 170th, with a mark of .423. The lack of slug is a problem, of course, but it isn’t as much of an issue as the team’s overall lack of offensive production, and Soler can’t fix that on his own, either.

ZiPS projects newcomer Jung Hoo Lee as San Francisco’s best hitter, with a 112 wRC+, one spot above LaMonte Wade Jr. That ranks them 84th and 85th overall, and they’re the team’s only players in the top 120. The only teams with less representation in the top 120 are the A’s and the Rockies. ZiPS projects a 106 wRC+ for Soler, which is understandable when you consider that before last year, when he posted a 126 wRC+, he had not recorded a single-season mark above 107 since 2019, when his wRC+ was 136. Even if Soler exceeds his projections, San Francisco’s lineup could still use some help, and there aren’t that many bats left out there.

Read the rest of this entry »

Eleven years ago, Jurickson Profar was the consensus pick as the game’s top prospect. Now he’s just days away from his 31st birthday and looking to rebound from the worst performance of his career. According to multiple reports, he’ll be returning to the Padres, a team whose roster is more than a little light on outfielders.

Profar spent the 2020–22 seasons with San Diego, turning in solid campaigns in the two bookends of that run. He posted a 113 wRC+ and 1.2 WAR in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season and a 111 wRC+ and a career-high 2.5 WAR in ’22; in the middle season, however, he sank to an 87 wRC+ and -0.6 WAR. After his comparatively strong 2022 showing, he opted out of a $7.5 million guarantee for ’23, instead taking a $1 million buyout. The move pretty much backfired, as he went unsigned last winter before finally inking a one-year, $7.75 million deal with the Rockies in mid-March after playing for Team Netherlands in the World Baseball Classic.

Whether it was the late signing date, the difficulty of adjusting to Colorado, or the eventual realization of just what he was in for with a team that lost 94 games in 2022 and had little expectation of improving in ’23, Profar struggled mightily. At the plate he hit just .236/.316/.364 with eight homers in 472 plate appearances for the Rockies, yielding just a 76 wRC+. If that wasn’t bad enough, he was absolutely brutal as a full-time left fielder according to the metrics, with -11 DRS and -12 OAA.

On Aug. 27, the Rockies released him, and four days later, he rejoined the Padres, who sent him to El Paso for a quick tuneup and then added him to the roster on Sept. 9. He collected three hits apiece in his first two games back, including a homer off the Astros’ Cristian Javier, and hit a reassuring .295/.367/.409 (120 wRC+) in 49 PA with San Diego. Still, he finished the year with -2.0 WAR, the lowest mark of any position player in the majors. So while he did land a major league contract, he ended up taking quite a pay cut. He’s guaranteed a base salary of $1 million, with incentives that can add another $1.5 million according to FanSided’s Robert Murray.

Profar was more effective against lefties (.275/.347/.427, 97 wRC+ in 147 PA) than righties (.229/.311/.345, 68 WRC+ in 374 PA) last year, but in the aggregate, he had been pretty platoon neutral prior to last season, with a 104 wRC+ against lefties and 100 against righties from 2018–22. While he showed disciplined when it came to chasing pitches out of the strike zone (just 24.5% in 2023, a point below his career norm) and swung at more pitches than ever inside the zone (68.5%), he just didn’t make much good contact. His 86.5 mph average exit velocity, 4% barrel rate, and 31.7% hard-hit rate respectively ranked in the ninth, 10th, and 12th percentiles, and it’s not as though he legged out extra hits with 13th-percentile speed. He outdid his .344 xSLG by a whole 24 points; otherwise his actual and expected numbers were just a few points apart.

All of which is to say that this isn’t a case of looking at a mediocre performance and seeing obvious signs of potential positive regression. This is one where a rebound is likely to be driven by soft factors. Connected to general manager A.J. Preller from their days with the Rangers, Profar is back in an environment where he has performed well, and one where he’s considered a popular, positive presence. From The Athletic’s Dennis Lin:

A popular teammate, Profar has long been close with such players as [Fernando Tatis Jr.] and infielders Ha-Seong Kim and Manny Machado.

“It’s hard to quantify; otherwise, we would have this thing figured out in our game,” [manager Mike] Shildt said. “But having the experience and knowing how important clubhouses are, how important it is to have positive guys that also can share truths with everybody around them, hold guys accountable in a good way — Jurickson brings that.”

If you’re wondering about how often players who plummet as far below replacement level as Profar did turn things around the next season, the answer is not often. Going back to 2001, I found 28 other player-seasons with at least 200 PA and -2.0 WAR. Twelve of those were by catchers, many whose values were retroactively downgraded by negative framing run estimates; I wasn’t really interested in their fates (sorry, guys). Of the 16 other players, one never played in the majors again, while the rest averaged 376 PA and 0.6 WAR in their follow-up seasons, with Aubrey Huff (5.7 WAR in 2010), Adam Dunn (2.1 WAR in 2012) and Jermaine Dye (1.8 WAR in 2004) the big success stories; each went on to extend his career by at least a couple more years. On the other hand, seven of the 15 were below replacement level the next year as well, and many of them didn’t play much longer. Profar’s own Depth Charts projection looks a lot like that group’s average: .238/.325/.369 (93 wRC+) with 0.2 WAR in 364 PA.

It’s difficult to envision Profar getting a ton of playing time with that kind of performance, but right now, the Padres’ outfield picture is a nearly blank canvas. Prior to his signing, the team had just two outfielders on its 40-man roster, namely Fernando Tatis Jr. and José Azocar, both right-handed hitters. The 25-year-old Tatis played in a career-high 141 games last year after returning from his 80-game suspension for violating the game’s performance-enhancing drug policy, and while he hit just .257/.322/.449 for a career-low 113 wRC+, stellar defense (10 OAA and 29 DRS in right field, 8 OAA and 27 DRS including his 30 innings in center) boosted his overall production to 4.4 WAR. Azocar, who turns 28 on May 11, hit for a 78 wRC+ in 102 PA last year and owns a career .249/.292/.341 (81 wRC+) line in 318 PA over two seasons. The small-sample metrics suggest he’s an above-average center fielder, but he doesn’t project to do much as a hitter.

As for the space that’s been vacated, with the death of chairman Peter Seidler and a mandate to trim last year’s payroll ($280.3 million for Competitive Balance Tax purposes), Juan Soto and Trent Grisham were traded to the Yankees in early December in exchange for a five-player package headlined by Michael King. Soto made 154 starts in left field for the Padres last year, Grisham 142 starts in center; along with Tatis, they accounted for 90.5% of the team’s plate appearances as outfielders. Other than Azocar, who started 14 times in center, nine in right and once in left and took 95 PA as an outfielder, they had seven players who combined for just 100 PA in that capacity, with Profar (24) the leader. The six others are gone from the organization, with David Dahl, the team’s Opening Day right fielder last year, and Adam Engel, who briefly played center, released in the first half of last season. Rougned Odor is now a Yomiuri Giant, while Ben Gamel and Taylor Kohlwey both signed minor league deals with the Mets, and Brandon Dixon has yet to resurface with another organization.

Obviously, that leaves a lot of playing time to give at two of the three outfield spots. Beyond Profar, the team has half a dozen non-roster invitees in camp. Three have major league experience, namely 29-year-old righty-swinging Óscar Mercado, 28-year-old switch-hitter Bryce Johnson, and 24-year-old lefty Cal Mitchell. Mercado is the most experienced, a former Guardians prospect who made 32 PA for the Cardinals — who originally drafted him in the second round in 2013 — last year. He owns a career .237/.289/.388 (82 wRC+) line in 973 PA but has at least shown he can play center field. Last year, he hit .299/.367/.523 (114 wRC+) with 14 homers in 347 PA spread out between Triple-A stops in Memphis, El Paso, and Oklahoma City. Mainly a center fielder, Johnson, a 2017 sixth-round pick by the Giants, hit .163/.229/.256 (35 wRC+) in his 48 PA with San Francisco last year, but he did bat a healthier .280/.373/.455 (103 wRC+) with eight homers and 18 steals in 298 PA at Triple-A Sacramento. Mitchell, a 2017 second-round pick by the Pirates, made just five plate appearances for Pittsburgh last year after hitting .226/.286/.349 (78 wRC+) in 232 PA as a right fielder in 2022. He hit a thin .261/.333/.414 (87 wRC+) at Triple-A Indianapolis in 2023, after a much better showing at that level, .339/.391/.547 (146 wRC+) the year before.

Of more interest among the NRIs are prospects Jakob Marsee, Tirso Ornelas, and Robert Perez Jr. Eric Longenhagen covered the first two in more detail last month in the Padres’ Imminent Big Leaguers roundup. The 22-year-old Marsee, a lefty, is a 40+ FV center field prospect who hit .273/.413/.425 (142 wRC+) with 13 homers and 41 steals in 400 PA at High-A Fort Wayne, then .286/.412/.446 (134 wRC+) with three homers and five steals in 69 PA at Double-A San Antonio, and capped it with an MVP-winning performance in the Arizona Fall League. As you might ascertain from the stolen base totals, his 60-grade speed is his best tool, and his contact and chase-rate data is very promising. Longenhagen described him as a fourth outfielder type whose statistical case is stronger than his visual one: “Marsee is barrel chested and stocky, a bit stiff, and I think he has some plate coverage issues (big velo up/away) that have yet to be exposed by (mostly) A-ball pitching. Marsee is a short-levered pull hitter capable of doing damage versus pitches on the very inner edge of the plate, and I think pitchers can neutralize his power by staying away from him.”

Ornelas is a Tijuana-born 23-year-old lefty swinger who hit .285/.371/.452 (111 wRC+) with 15 homers and eight steals split between San Antonio (126 wRC+) and El Paso (92 wRC+). Longehagen, who has compared him to Billy McKinney, wrote that Ornelas has undergone multiple swing changes with limited success in tapping into his plus raw power, but he does hit the ball hard (42% hard-hit rate, 114 mph max exit velo). A 23-year-old righty hitter from Venezuela, Perez hit .242/.321/.416 (93 wRC+) with 17 homers for the Mariners’ Double-A Arkansas affiliate last season. His 7.5% walk rate and 30.5% strikeout rate were downright cringeworthy, which explains what Longenhagen wrote when he placed him among the Mariners’ other prospects of note last summer. “[Perez] has plus power, but his combo of whiffs and poor plate discipline has kept him in this section of the list for a while.”

According to Kevin Acee of the San Diego Union-Tribune, the Padres plan to experiment with 20-year-old shortstop Jackson Merrill, the team’s 2021 first-round pick, in the outfield as well. Merrill, currently the team’s number two prospect (55 FV), hit a combined .277/.326/.444 (108 wRC+) with 15 homers and 15 steals split between High-A Fort Wayne and Double-A San Antonio. Blocked by Xander Bogaerts and Ha-Seong Kim in the middle infield, he’s already traveling down the defensive spectrum because of his below-average hands; at San Antonio he played five games in left field, two at second base, and one at first. For Longenhagen, playing Merrill at third base (in place of Machado as he recovers from elbow surgery) or left field during the spring represents “the best chance for the Padres to catch a special sort of lightning in a bottle.”

Added Shildt, “We do want to kind of read the tea leaves and get him in the outfield and let him see what that looks like.” While the manager cited Profar’s versatility, his 31 innings at first base and one at second after rejoining the Padres last September were his first non-outfield innings since 2021.

The Padres intend to add another outfielder and a starting pitcher, according to Acee, and still have about $20 million to spend to keep themselves under the first CBT threshold of $237 million. Among the free agent outfielders still on the market are Adam Duvall and Michael A. Taylor, both of whom are capable center fielders, as well as Tommy Pham, Whit Merrifield, Eddie Rosario, Randal Grichuk, and Robbie Grossman. All of which is to say that the ink’s hardly dry on this picture, and despite Profar’s signing, he’ll have to work to keep from getting erased from it.

Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article incorrectly identified the cities of the Padres’ High-A and Double-A affiliates. This has been corrected.

I was hired to be FanGraphs’ Lead Prospect Analyst just after the 2016 Draft and took my first run at evaluating the entire minor leagues on my own the following winter. Enough time has now passed that many of the players from that era of prospecting have had big league careers transpire (or not). Hindsight allows me to have a pretty definitive idea of whether my call on a player was right or wrong in a binary sense, and gauge the gap between my evaluation and what the player ultimately became. Looking back allows me to assess my approach to grading and ranking players so that I might begin to establish some baselines of self-assessment and see how I perform compared to my peers at other publications. I spent time this offseason compiling the various Top 100 prospect rankings from seven years ago for the purposes of such a self-assessment. Below are the results of that exercise and my thoughts on them.

There are absolutely deeper avenues of retrospective analysis that can be done with prospect lists than what I have attempted below, approaches that could educate us about prospects themselves, and probably also about prospect writers. Before we get to a couple of big, fun tables and my notes, I want to quickly go over why I took the approach I did here, discuss its flaws, and posit other potential methods (while also including some thoughts about their limitations). Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Mets were born in farcical circumstances, and have spent 62 years trying to wipe clean the memory of their ludicrous infancy. Now that they have the richest owner in the league and one of the top executives in baseball manning the tiller, we’re probably close to the end of the Mets’ reign as baseball’s pre-eminent (and I apologize for stealing an idiom from soccer) banter club.

But Billy Eppler gave them a hell of an encore before the curtain drops for good. Last week, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred suspended Eppler until after this year’s World Series. That sanction comes after a four-month investigation into the former Mets GM’s misuse of the injured list as a de facto taxi squad during the 2022 and 2023 seasons. Jesse Rogers of ESPN reported that Eppler directed the team to fabricate injuries for “up to a dozen players.” Read the rest of this entry »

I thought that today’s article was going to be an easy one to write. Reading Alex Chamberlain’s post on the pulled fly ball revolution made me imagine the worst pitch a pitcher could throw: a sinker that ended up high and inside, an easy-to-contact fastball in the area of the plate that leads to the most damaging types of opposing batted balls. Then I extrapolated my idea out a little bit. Maybe I could look up the pitchers who throw their sinkers high in the zone most often. We could all laugh about how they’re called “sinkers” — so that’s clearly a bad place to throw them. Maybe we would gawk at a table of a few pitchers who do this bad thing, and then we could move on with life.

Well, I can do at least one thing. Here’s a table of the pitchers who threw elevated sinkers in or around the strike zone most frequently in 2023:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Chicago Cubs boast one of the top farms systems in the game, and Dan Kantrovitz is a key reason why. The club’s VP of Scouting for each of the last four drafts, Kantrovitz has overseen the selections of first rounders such as Matt Shaw, Cade Horton, and Jordan Wicks. Thanks in part to shrewd drafting, the Cubs’ prospect pipeline is robust on both the pitcher and position player sides.

A St. Louis native, Kantrovitz attended and played baseball at Brown University, where he recorded 208 hits in his four years as the starting shortstop. After he graduated with a degree in Organizational Behavior and Management in 2001, his hometown Cardinals selected him in the 25th round of the MLB draft. Assigned to the Johnson City Cardinals of the Appalachian League, he went 1-for-3 in his first and only professional game; a shoulder injury from his senior year of college flared up again and ended his playing career.

Kantrovitz joined the Cardinals front office in 2004, and a few years later, he went to Harvard for a two-year master’s program in statistics, hoping to develop the skills to keep pace with the growing analytics movement in baseball. He got a job in the Oakland A’s front office upon graduating from Harvard. St. Louis hired him back to be its amateur scouting director in 2012, before he returned to Oakland three years later and worked for five seasons as the the team’s assistant GM. Wanting to get back into a draft-specific role, he took his current position with the Cubs in late 2019. Baseball has changed over his two decades working in front offices, and his understanding of the game and his approach to scouting has evolved with it.

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David Laurila: A number of mock drafts are published prior to the draft itself. Do scouting directors pay attention to them?

Dan Kantrovitz: “I think it would be disingenuous for any scouting director, or front office, to say that they don’t pay attention to mock drafts by respected third-party publications — especially as you get closer to the draft. Now, do we rely on our internal data to make draft decisions? Yes, of course. Do we also want to have an idea of what might happen before and after us? Also a yes. Sometimes mock drafts can be a solid indicator of what the rest of the industry might be thinking. If nothing else, they are certainly fun.”

Laurila: Our own mock draft from last year had you taking Nolan Schanuel, a college first baseman whom the Angels took a few picks before you selected middle infielder Matt Shaw 13th overall. Generally speaking, what are your thoughts on drafting first basemen in early rounds? Read the rest of this entry »